Posts Tagged ‘phonies’

[Apologies for the lack of updates this week - I've been RIDICULOUSLY SICK, and today was the first day since Tuesday that I haven't had an insane fever!]
For the past few years I’ve been meaning to re-read The Catcher in the Rye, but never seemed to make the time to do so. Then J.D. Salinger passed away on January 27, and I finally got the push I’d been needing. Notorious for being a recluse who hated journalists and publicity of any kind, I figured re-reading the misadventures of misanthropic Holden Caulfield would be an appropriate tribute. It may still have been more attention than Salinger himself would have liked, given that he never stopped writing but simply stopped publishing, but I still wanted to give the man his due.
I can’t remember exactly when I first encountered The Catcher in the Rye, but I do know I was likely far too young to have been reading it; I’m sure I was around 9 or 10… what were my parents thinking?!? I remember borrowing it from the library and being utterly enthralled by it. I don’t think I was a particularly angsty pre-teen, but I remember hungrily devouring Holden’s narrative and reverently cherishing the novel. Evidently I loved it enough that my parents gave me a beautiful hard-bound copy for Christmas in 1995 - when I was 12 years old. That’s the copy that I still read from today, and is the copy I’m sure I read from in Grade 11 English when we studied the novel. At the age of 15, I think I was better placed to see myself reflected in Holden’s narrative, specifically his vitriolic rage against the phonies and the morons who pester him wherever he goes. Again, I don’t think I was an especially angry teenager, but… I was still a teenager. Just so you understand my love affair with this book, I admit that as pretentious and uninspiring as it may seem now, in my final year of highschool the quote underneath my graduation photo in the yearbook was the following:

I bet you never thought I post about Gwyneth Paltrow and food in the same entry (and in a positive light, no less!)...
Some of you may have heard that Gwyneth has started an online newsletter endeavor, bizzarely called GOOP. Maybe it has something to do with her intials? Who knows! Anyway, Gwynnie's whole purpose with GOOP is that she wants to "nourish the inner aspect", and so in every mailing, she provides advice on things to purchase for your wardrobe, places to stay, restaurants to try, and perhaps most shocking of all, recipes to make. In one installment, Gwyneth muses about how she's earned a bum rap in the media with respect to her diet, namely that she follows an extreme one that involves her grazing on grass and not much else. Granted, when her first offering of 2009 is about a week-long cleanse that focuses on shakes and soups, well, the press might be on to something, is all I’m saying!
Now, Gwyneth has starred in a quite a few movies that I enjoy quite a bit, but I must confess that off-screen I find her pretty insufferable. I don’t really believe that she noshes on duck burgers and fries when she visits L.A., and I dislike how she tries to have it both ways: all-American girl but also super English sophisticate (no wonder she’s purported to be pals with Madonna). That being said, I did pick up a tip in one of her recipe newsletters about browning meat. It might be something everyone already knows, but here it is: if you want your meat to brown, make sure it’s at room temperature before you put it in your hot pan. If it’s fresh from the fridge, it’ll just simmer and boil in its own juices. If you’re an impulsive cook like I am, it might be hard to make this happen, but if you’re making a dish where properly browned meat will really sing, then that’s how you’re going to make it happen.
I'll leave it up to you to search out her recipe for Super Greens Juice...

True confession time: I first encountered J.D. Salinger when I was about 10 years old. I was still of the age where I read magazines aimed at my target demographic, those being of the ilk of Bop, Big Bopper, Tiger Beat, etc., At sleepovers, my best friend and I would giggle over articles involving Zack Morris from Saved By The Bell, and Leonardo DiCaprio, then famous for portraying the homeless boy Luke, who was adopted by the Seaver family on Growing Pains. Good times. Now, of course, J.D. Salinger himself was not featured in the illustrious pages of Tiger Beat. For one thing, this would have been well into the era when Salinger had become a recluse and was no longer granting interviews, never mind posing for pin-up spreads. No, instead I heard about him when reading an interview with one of my favorite actresses of the time, Sarah Gilbert (she who portrayed the sardonic daughter Darlene on Roseanne). It was a questionnaire-style interview, and under “Favorite Book” she had written The Catcher in the Rye. And so, on my next trip to the local library, I checked it out. [Further guilty, but true!, confession: when I was about 7 or 8, I checked out Wuthering Heights simply because it was the favorite book of Mary-Anne Spier from The Baby-Sitters Club book series. Clearly it was way over my head… but when I read it again almost a decade later, I still didn’t like it!]
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